Here’s the introduction to my upcoming book, PowerPointless: Interactive Presentation Strategies That Can Free You and Your Audience from the Chains of PowerPoint.

Think about the last ten presentations you attended. How many of the presenters had PowerPoint slideshows that accompanied their talks? Chances are, all of them. We’ve become almost completely dependent on PowerPoint or similar presentation software in our business, training, sales, and educational interactions that we almost can’t conceive of a conference or classroom without the ubiquitous projector, screen, laptop, and remote.

I’m the first person to say that technology is a wonderful thing. I loved, loved, LOVED it when we all switched from terrible hand-made visuals—or somewhat better ones made at Kinko’s at midnight—to electronically-generated slideshows that looked so much better than the hand-made stuff ever had. Even in the hands of design hacks like me who relied far too heavily on bad clip art and Star Wars-like transitions between slides, slideshow software made it possible for everyone to make decent visuals, even on short notice and with no budget. It was a fantastic revolution, and I don’t mean to put down its value in the big scheme of things at all.

Unfortunately, as with most good things, we went too far with it, got too dependent on it, and lost touch with what we were trying to do with it in the first place. We give and attend presentations to connect with each other and build relationships, skills, and knowledge in meaningful and transferrable ways. These days, though, most people’s idea of a good presentation is a slideshow with some schmo blathering beside it. It should be the other way around! The slideshow should simply be a tool that enhances the speaker’s message, not the focus of the show. Too often, the audience ends up reading bullet points off the screen instead of listening to what the speaker has to say about each point. They’re staring at the screen instead of looking at the speaker, whose message is often punctuated by gestures, facial expressions, and other body language cues, as well as anecdotes and insights that are the real heart of the talk. If the slideshow is the primary focus of the presentation and any old speaker could click through and read it, attendees may as well just stay home and download the slideshow; they’d get the same value out of it.

So why do organizations continue to hire real people to speak to their companies or associations in person rather than simply downloading a whole slew of lovely slideshows? They want the speaker’s expertise, experience, and insight. They want the personal connection of a human being interacting with their employees, members, or attendees. They want the emotion, the anecdotes, and the humor a good speaker brings to the room. They want a relationship.

Relationships: I think that’s really what people sense is missing from too many of our modern interactions with each other. We “connect” all the time in networking events, conferences, in social media, and more. But those connections, more and more often, fail to go beyond an exchange of business cards, a mutual follow on Twitter, and a quick add on LinkedIn. We “connect” in these superficial ways, and then we forget about each other for the most part. Most people who attend business or association conferences say that their number one reason for attending is to network. They are seeking more than a pile of business cards and social media friend requests, though. They want real relationships—meaningful ones that lead to mutual benefits for everyone. When relationship-building is a meeting attendee’s primary purpose, the presentations they attend are actually a huge impediment for them, and they enter the room already distracted and wishing the presentation were over before it begins so that they can go back to networking. PowerPoint adds to this problem because it forces the audience to sit quietly, staring at a screen, listening with half their attention at best to the speaker’s words, while at the same time forcing the speaker to stick to a predetermined script, regardless of the needs of the particular audience in the room.

The way to solve this is, clearly, to turn off the projector. When there is no giant screen to focus on, the audience focuses on the speaker and is far more likely to engage with him or her. And when they engage, they’re far more likely to interact. And when they interact, they form relationships with the speaker and each other. This helps new knowledge and concepts to become transferable to their real lives, which means they are more likely to take action and gain true value from the presentation.

PowerPointless presentations aren’t just speakers without slideshows, though. These presentations are highly interactive in nature. A PowerPointless presentation requires the speaker to relinquish a great deal of control to the audience. The speaker must view herself as a facilitator rather than a “sage on the stage” who has all the great ideas to be bestowed upon the empty vessels in the audience. A PowerPointless presenter is prepared to fill the entire time herself, but she hopes she won’t get to say all of her own ideas because her audience is so eager to share their own brilliance with each other. In a way, it’s a crowd-sourced presentation. PowerPointless is an audience-centered, relationship-driven philosophy of in-person communication that’s both old-fashioned and modern in its approach. It uses old-school hands-on techniques, combined with judicious use of technology and online tools, to engage audience members and speakers alike by tapping into their visual, auditory, and tactile learning styles in equal parts. PowerPointless presentations, if done well, are different every time, are genuinely customized to each audience, and usually lead to the speaker learning as much as the attendees. PowerPointless presentations also facilitate those all-important personal interactions and connections that most audience members are seeking.

UPCOMING WORKSHOP WITH LESLIE HANCOCK

July 20, 2012

Are you tired of giving the same old PowerPoint presentations? Do you want to engage your audience more when you speak? Do you need innovative presentation techniques for venues that lack standard equipment? Join Leslie Hancock, an award-winning speaker and educator, to learn hands-on interactive presentation techniques for any venue or industry.

UPCOMING WORKSHOP WITH LESLIE HANCOCK

“Developing a Distinctive Online Voice”

You know those great bloggers you just love to read because you feel like you can “hear” them talking to you when you read their stuff? Their personalities seem so vivid, like people you know (or want to know), even if you’ve never seen nor met them in your life. You visit their sites over and over again, feeling like you’re visiting a friend’s house, eager to see what they have to say each day. That’s because they have strong and distinctive voices that come through in every word they type. How do they do that?

In this workshop, learn how to cultivate your own distinctive voice in your writing, building authenticity and your personal brand in the process and engaging readers more effectively. We will analyze blog posts written with particularly engaging voices and identify what makes them linguistically unique. Then, in an interactive workshop, you will describe your blogging persona in-depth and practice tweaking passages with word choice and varying grammatical patterns until you stand out from the crowd with writing that consistently demonstrates your own strong and unique personal voice.

Good news! I have a new program in development. It’s an interactive presentation about developing your online voice. Contact me to reserve your date for this in-depth analysis of what makes a company’s online voice unique, appropriate, and engaging.

Leslie will be a featured speaker at Austin Community College’s Social Media Forum on Saturday, March 31, 2012 at the ACC Eastview Campus. She will be discussing what it means to be a social media professional, how the field is growing and evolving, and how to get a job in social media in Austin. Using her perspective as a social media consultant and a board member for the Social Media Club of Austin, Leslie will cover trends, tools, and expectations for those who are already in the field of social business or considering entering it.

Leslie is proud to serve on the Advisory Committee for ACC’s Social Media Certification program and to help launch the college’s social media course offerings.

Leslie will be presenting her “PowerPointless” program at RISE Austin 2012 on Tuesday, March 27th in the Turnstone Bus at 2:00 p.m. The bus will be parked at the Village Shopping Center at 2700 Anderson Ln, near Link Coworking.

In “PowerPointless: Interactive Presentation Strategies To Engage Any Audience,” Leslie provides a hands-on solution-oriented approach to throwing off the shackles of PowerPoint and interacting more meaningfully with an audience of any size in any venue.

RISE (Relationship and Information Series for Entrepreneurs) is a unique “unconference” for entrepreneurs that takes place over a week’s time, spread all over town in a variety of venues, at no cost to participants.

Leslie is pleased to become a contributing member of the All Content Matters Tribe, a collaborative group of content professionals in Austin, Texas. The All Content Tribe, founded by Sherry Lowry, is producing a series of professional development workshops in 2012 on topics of interest to its membership. The All Content Matters series launched to sold-out rooms in January and February and appears to be set to gather momentum as the year goes on. Leslie is tentatively set to present a workshop she is currently developing called “Powerpointless: Interactive Presentation Strategies to Increase Audience Engagement” to ACM participants in early summer 2012.

If you or your organization would like dibs on this new workshop, contact Leslie to be informed when development is complete and bookings begin.